Acting Platoon-Captain Hulmok Arthag mistrusted the shadows in this thick, towering forest. Then again, Hulmok Arthag mistrusted most things in life, including people. Not without reason; Arpathians learned the meaning of prejudice the instant they set foot outside Arpathia.
The other races of Sharona made Arpathians the butt of jokes and viewed them—some tolerantly, some nastily—as barbarians. But no one made jokes about Hulmok Arthag, and if he was considered an unlettered barbarian, no one said so within his earshot.
He'd also learned, growing up on the endless Arpathian plains, that no sane man put his faith in the vagaries of wind, weather, fire, or even grass. Wind could bring death by tornado, weather by the freezing howl of blizzards that quick-froze everything caught in them, or the slower death of drought. Fire could blaze out of control, driven by wind to consume everything in its path. Grass could wither and fail, leaving no fodder for the herds, and when the herds failed, eventually there would be no one left to bury or burn the dead.
What Arthag did trust were his own strong hands, his own determination, and the hearts of those under his command. Not their minds, for no man's—or woman's—mind could be guaranteed, let alone trusted. But a heart could be measured, if one looked into its depths with the sort of Talent that laid its innermost secrets bare, and Hulmok Arthag had that Talent. He didn't misuse it, as some might have, but when it came to assessing the men under his command, he used it ruthlessly, indeed, and he'd come up with many ways to get rid of any man who failed to meet his own rigorous standards.
"Platoon-Captain."
Arthag looked up. It was Mikal Grigthir, the trooper he'd sent forward as an advance scout. Grigthir trotted his horse up to the small campfire where Arthgag sat, waiting with the rest of the halted column for his report, reined in, and saluted sharply.
"Good to see you in one piece," Arthag growled, returning the salute.
"Thank you, Sir." Grigthir had been with Arthag for less than six months, only since the Arpathian had been brevetted to his present acting rank and given command of Second Platoon, Argent Company, of the Ninety-Second Independent Cavalry Battalion. But he was an experienced man, an old hand out here on the frontier, and Arthag had complete faith in his judgment.
"What did you find?" the petty-captain continued.
"I found their final camp, Sir. It's been pillaged. Most of their gear was abandoned, but there's not a weapon left in the whole stockade. Not even a single cartridge case."
"They took the donkeys, then?" Arthag asked with a frown.
"No, Sir. I found them wandering loose around the camp. But the attack didn't take place anywhere near the stockade. Voice Kinlafia was right—our people got out in time and started hiking back toward the portal. They got further than we'd thought, too. I found plenty of sign to mark their trail, both their own and their pursuers'. I'd estimate that they were followed by at least fifty men on foot."
"Fifty." Arthag swore, although it wasn't really that much of a surprise. "You say you found their back trail," he continued after a moment. "Did you find where they were attacked, too?"
"Yes, Sir." Grigthir swallowed. "I did."
"And?" Arthag asked sharply, noticing the tough, experienced cavalry trooper's expression.
"It's . . . unnatural, Sir."
Grigthir was pale, visibly shaken, and Arthag drew a deep breath. He looked around at the thirty-odd men of his cavalry platoon, then nodded sharply to himself.
"All right, Mikal," he said. "Show me."
The forest was eerie as the platoon moved out once more in column, following Grigthir. The woods were too silent and far too deep for Arthag's liking. He'd grown accustomed to soldiering in any terrain, but he was a son of the plains, born to a line of plainsmen that reached back into dimmest antiquity. His ancient forebears had halted the eastward Ternathian advance in its tracks. Able to live off the land, fade into the velvet night, and strike supply trains and columns on the march at will, the Arpathian Septs had destroyed so many Ternathian armies that the emperor had finally stopped sending them.
But the Septs had learned from the violent conflict, as well, and where Ternathian armies had failed, merchants and diplomats had succeeded. The Septs had ceased raiding their unwanted neighbors, learning to trade with them, instead. That had led to greater prosperity than they had ever before known, yet no septman or septwoman had ever adopted Ternathian ways. Sons and daughters of the plains felt smothered and suffocated by walls and ceilings of wood or stone.
And this son of the plains felt closed in and vulnerable in a place like this forest, where he could see no farther than a few dozen yards but hidden enemy eyes could watch his men, waiting to strike from ambush whenever and wherever they chose. Grigthir had estimated fifty men in the force which had pursued and attacked the Chalgyn Consortium survey party, but where there were fifty, there might be a hundred, or five hundred, or more. Not a comforting thought for a man with fewer than forty troopers under his command.
As he rode along, he couldn't help wondering if Sharona's first contact with other humans would have ended in violence if both sides had glimpsed one another at a distance on a windswept plain, rather than stumbling unexpectedly across one another's paths in this unholy tangle of trees?
He snorted under his breath. Questions like that were a waste of time. However it had happened, Sharona had met its first inter-universal neighbors in blood under these trees, and that was all that mattered. It was his job to find any possible survivors—and take prisoners of his own for questioning, if he could—not to ponder the imponderables of life.
So Arthag guided his horse with knees and feet alone, leaving his hands free for weapons. He carried his rifle with the safety off, the barrel laid carefully along his horse's neck to avoid tangling the muzzle in vegetation, while he watched his mount's ears carefully.
The Portal Authority had adopted the Ternathian Model 10 rifle for its cavalry, as well as its infantry. Arthag wasn't positive he agreed with the idea, but he had to admit that if they were going to issue a compromise weapon to cavalry and infantry alike, the Model 10 was about as good as it was going to get. The Ternathian Bureau of Weapons had designed the Model 10 for use by infantry, Marines, and cavalry from the outset. It was a bolt-action, chambered in .40 caliber, with a twelve-round box magazine. Its semi-bullpup design gave it a twenty-six-inch barrel, but with an overall length that was short enough to be convenient in close quarters—like in small boats, or on horseback.
It was a precision instrument in trained hands, and Arthag's hands were definitely trained.
So was his horse. Bright Wind was no army nag. His exalted pedigree was as long and as fine as any Ternathian prince's, and his schooling in the art of war had begun the day he'd begun nursing at his dam's teats.
Hulmok Arthag's people were nomads, and Arthag was the son of a Sept chieftain—a younger son, true, with no hope of inheriting his father's Sept Staff, but that had never been his dream, anyway. There were always some men—and women—who felt the call to wander more strongly than their brothers and sisters, and Arthag had always been one of them. In times past, men like him had led the Septs to new lands, new pastures and trade routes. In the shrunken, modern world, hemmed in by others' borders, those who felt the ancient call did what Arthag had chosen to do and sought new pastures beyond the portals. And when Arthag had left the Sept, he'd asked only one gift of his father: Bright Wind.
Under the Portal Authority's accords, any trooper had the right to bring his own horse with him, if he chose, and if the horse in question met the Authority's minimum standards. Less than a third of them took advantage of that offer, but Arthag had never met an Arpathian who hadn't, and his own mount was the envy of many a general officer. All of which explained why Arthag watched the stallion's reactions so carefully. Bright Wind could be taken by surprise, of course, but his senses were far keener than Arthag's, and both horse and rider had learned to trust them implicitly.
They were perhaps an hour or an hour and a half's ride from the abandoned stockade when Bright Wind suddenly laid back his ears and halted. Arthag felt the shudder that caught the stallion's muscles a single heartbeat before they turned to iron. And then a slight shift in the wind brought the scent to him, as well. Smoke: a complex, unnatural stink that mingled foully with the ordinary scent of wood smoke and less ordinary smell of burnt flesh. Bright Wind's golden flanks had darkened with sweat, but the stallion wasn't afraid. Nostrils distended, ears pinned flat, he was ready for battle.
"What in Harmana's holy name is that stench?" Junior-Armsman Soral Hilovar muttered softly. The Ricathian Tracer wore an expression of horror, and something inside Arthag quivered. He didn't share Hilovar's Talent, but he didn't need to—not with that stench blowing on the wind.
"Let's go find out," he said quietly. He turned in the saddle, waving hand signals to the column which had halted instantly behind him. Scouts peeled off from the flanks, spreading out. The precaution was almost certainly unnecessary, but Hulmok Arthag didn't care.
Once his skirmishers were in position, he touched Bright Wind with his heels. The stallion stepped forward, dainty yet tense, and Petty-Captain Arthag rode out from under the trees into a scene of nightmare.
It was even worse than any of them had been expecting, particularly for Darcel Kinlafia. The Voice really should have been left behind with Company-Captain Halifu, but he'd flatly refused, and he hadn't been at all shy about it. He might be legally under Halifu's authority, despite his own civilian status, but he hadn't really seemed to care about that.
Arthag's platoon had only been attached to Halifu's command for a couple of months. The Chalgyn Consortium team's rapid-fire chain of discoveries had the Portal Authority scrambling for troops to forward to the new frontier. Arthag's men had been among the units swept up by the Authority broom and whisked off to an entirely new universe—and attached to an equally new CO—with less than a week's warning. A man got used to that in the Authority's service.
But although Arthag scarcely knew Halifu well, he didn't think Kinlafia would have been able to browbeat the company-captain into acquiescence if it hadn't been for the fact that he was the Voice who'd received Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr's final message. Unlike Arthag or any of his troopers, Kinlafia had already seen the battlefield through Shaylar's eyes. That meant he might be able to give Hilovar or Nolis Parcanthi, the Tracer and Whiffer Halifu had attached to Arthag for the rescue mission, some critical bits of information or explanation which would let them figure out what had really happened here.
But whatever Kinlafia had seen through Shaylar's eyes, it obviously hadn't been enough to prepare him for what he saw through his own. He let out a low, ghastly sound as his gaze swept across the killing field where so many of his friends had died. It was pitifully clear that he saw something Arthag didn't—and couldn't—and Parcanthi reached across to grip Kinlafia's shoulder in wordless sympathy and support.
"Standard perimeter overwatch. Chief-Armsman chan Hathas," Arthag said briskly, pretending he hadn't noticed the Voice's distress. "First Squad has the perimeter. Third has the reserve. Second Squad will dismount and prepare to assist Parcanthi and Hilovar on request, but keep them out from underfoot until they're called for."
"Yes, Sir!" Rayl chan Hathas, Second Platoon's senior noncom, saluted sharply and turned to deal with Arthag's instructions. For a moment, Arthag envied him intensely. He would far rather have buried himself in the comfort of a familiar routine rather than face the sort of discoveries he was afraid they were going to make.
"Soral, Nolis," he continued, turning to the two specialists. "Do what you can to tell us what happened here. The rest of the column will remain outside the clearing until you're finished."
Hilovar and Parcanthi nodded, dismounted—awkwardly, in Parcanthi's case—and tied their reins to fallen branches. Arthag allowed no trace of amusement to cross his expressionless nomad's face—the Septs had their reputation to maintain, after all—but neither the Whiffer nor Tracer were cavalry troopers. They were technically infantry, and Parcanthi looked like a lumpy bag of potatoes in the saddle. Hilovar wasn't a lot better, and Arthag found the two of them about as unmilitary as anyone he'd ever seen in uniform. Hilovar was a tall, solidly built Ricathian who'd been a Tracer for a major civilian police department before the fascination of the frontier drew him into the Authority's service. Parcanthi, a bit shorter than Hilovar but even broader, was a Farnalian with flaming red hair and a complexion which Arthag suspected started peeling about a half-hour before sunrise. On a rainy day.
Both of them, despite their relatively junior noncommissioned ranks, were the sort of critically important specialists the Authority was always eager to get its hands on. And as critically needed specialists often did, they had a tendency to write their own tickets—often without actually realizing they'd even done it. Which, when it came right down to it, was just fine with Hulmok Arthag. He suspected that both of them would be just about useless in a firefight, but they knew that as well as he did. If it came to it, both of them were smart enough to stay out of the line of fire (if they could), and that, too, suited Arthag just fine, because they were also far too valuable to risk in a firefight. As it happened, and despite their lack of horsemanship or military polish, he liked what he'd seen of both of them—a lot. And if they could tell him anything about what had happened here, he would forgive them any military faux pas they might ever commit.
He waited until he was confident chan Hathas had the perimeter organized, then dismounted himself with a murmured command to Bright Wind, whose ears flicked in acknowledgment. Until and unless he told the golden stallion it was time to move, Bright Wind would stay exactly where he was. Arthag patted the horse's shoulder gently, then stepped up to the edge of the clearing, rifle ready, and settled in to wait.
There'd been no rain and little wind, which was a godsend for Parcanthi. Even so, the residual energy had already begun to dissipate. A sense of horror and pain would doubtless linger for years, but raw emotion wasn't what Parcanthi—and the rest of Sharona—sought.
The Whiffer stepped out into the center of the toppled timber, closed his eyes, and reached out with quivering senses to taste the surviving residual patterns, and images flashed through him. Whiffs of what had been. Smoke. The crash and roar of rifle fire. Screams of agony.
He turned, eyes still closed, to face the trees where the Chalgyn Consortium's crew had sought cover. He caught a flash of Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl standing up, hands empty. Caught another flash of a uniformed man spinning around, raising a crossbow, firing. Yet another flash of chan Hagrahyl staggering back, throat pierced with steel.
Other flashes cannoned through him. Barris Kasell dying monstrously inside a massive lightning bolt. Men in strange uniforms falling to the broken ground, as bullets hammered through them. Other Sharonians back in the trees, caught by fireballs and crossbow fire.
He turned toward the standing trees where the enemy had formed his line, and more flashes came. Shouts in an alien tongue. Men rustling cautiously through the trees, circling around to get at the defenders' flanks. Strange, glassy tubes that belched flame and lightning, just as Kinlafia had described. And bodies. Everywhere he turned, Whiffing the air, Parcanthi saw bodies. Caught in tangled tree limbs, sprawled across toppled tree trunks . . . lying in neat rows.
He jerked his attention back to that flash and tried to recapture it, to wring more detail from it. He saw the dead laid out in careful rows, limbs arranged as if they were only sleeping. Other men moved among them, placing something small on each corpse. He could see Sharonian dead, as well as those of the enemy. They'd grouped the survey crew together, it looked like, but the images were so tenuous he couldn't tell for sure how many Sharonians there were. He was still trying to count when an unholy flash of light blinded him. The bodies began to burn with unnatural brilliance—
Parcanthi let out a yell and staggered back, gasping.
"What is it?" someone demanded, practically in his ear. "What did you Whiff?"
Parcanthi jerked around and found Hulmok Arthag standing at his shoulder.
"W-what?" he gulped, still more than a little disoriented.
"What did you Whiff?" Petty-Captain Arthag asked again, and Parcanthi swallowed hard.
"They cremated the dead," he answered, his voice hoarse. "With something . . . unnatural."
"I'm starting to dislike that adjective," the Arpathian officer growled. He glowered at the clearing for a moment, jaw working as if he wanted to spit. Then he shook himself and looked back at the Whiffer. "What else did you get?"
Parcanthi gave himself a shake, regathering his composure.
"Part of the battle Kinlafia described, Sir. Just faint glimpses. The details are already fading, dissipating. They cremated our dead, as well as their own, but the images are so tenuous, it's hard to tell how many of our people were burnt."
"Keep trying," Arthag said in clipped tones. "We need to know if there were survivors."
"Yes, Sir. I know. I'll do my best."
"Good man." Arthag put a hand briefly on his shoulder, then nodded. "Carry on, then."
As Parcanthi got back to work, Arthag turned toward Soral Hilovar, who was searching through the fallen trees where the Chalgyn crew had taken shelter.
"Anything?" he asked, and the Tracer looked up with a bitter expression.
"Whoever these bastards are, they left damned little behind. If I could get my hands on something of theirs, I could tell you a fair bit, but they were fiendishly thorough scavengers. I haven't found anything they left behind, and not a single piece of Sharonian equipment, either, for that matter. I've found spot after spot where our people set down packs, or what were probably ammunition boxes, but they're gone. All I've got so far is this."
He held up a handful of spent cartridge cases, and Arthag gazed at them through narrow eyes.
"They mean to learn all they can from our gear," he said flatly, then inhaled and grimaced at the Tracer. "Nolis says they cremated the dead. I know it won't be pleasant, but try reading the ash piles."
He nodded toward the most open portion of the clearing, where Parcanthi stood in the midst of fire scars the length and shape of human bodies. Hilovar's jaw muscles bunched, but he nodded with the choppiness of barely suppressed anger. Not at Arthag, the petty-captain knew, but at what he was going to find out there.
"Yes, Sir," he bit out. "I'll do whatever it takes, Sir."
The normally cheerful Ricathian stalked toward the fire scars. At least he wasn't a novice when it came to crime scene work. His ten-year stint as a homicide Tracer in Lubnasi, the city-state of his birth, had inured him to mere human cruelty and suffering. He understood that people did violence to one another, even in a world of telepaths. But this . . .
The ash pits, while macabre, were less horrifying to a former homicide Tracer than they would have been to a civilian. Not that they didn't bother Hilovar anyway, of course. But that was because he could already tell they were tainted with something not quite right, something profoundly disturbing. Whatever it was, he'd already encountered it when he Traced the survey crew's actual death sites.
He put that memory out of his mind, focusing on the immediate task as he knelt beside the first human-sized scorch mark. There wasn't much left, not even bone. A few twisted, melted bits of metal glinted dully in the ashes, but there wasn't even much of that. Not enough to tell if the bits had been buttons, or buckles, or something else entirely. Just a few droplets, where something had melted and dripped away until it coalesced into ugly, formless flakes and bits too small even to call pebbles.
Simply touching the ashes and splashes of metal sent vile prickles up his arms. Everything he touched gave off the same feeling as the death sites had, only worse. More concentrated. The vibrations of the energy he would normally have sensed in a place where humans had been incinerated—a house fire, say—had been warped by something uncanny in these ash pits. The residues crawled along his skin uncomfortably, like being jabbed with thousands of microscopic pins.
When he double-checked with Parcanthi on the location of cremation sites that were almost certainly Sharonian, then cross-referenced with sites which had definitely contained the enemy's dead, he found exactly the same residues on both, which led to an inescapable conclusion. Whatever they'd used to cremate their own dead had been used to burn the Sharonian dead, as well, so the odd residue wasn't a signature given off by the enemy's bodies. And whatever it was, they'd used something similar to kill the Chalgyn Consortium's people in the first place, because that weapon had left behind the same unsettling energy residue, all over the death sites. It was exactly the same residue as whatever they'd used to ignite the funeral pyres, and he couldn't make any sense out of it at all.
"How were they burned?" he muttered to himself without even realizing he'd spoken aloud. "Whatever it was, it was damned odd."
It certainly hadn't been any fuel Hilovar had ever encountered. There was no wood ash, so it couldn't have been a traditional, archaic funeral pyre. It hadn't been kerosene, either, or some kind of flammable vegetable oil, or anything else he could think of. Besides, each of these fire scars was exactly the size of a single body . . . and they'd been burned out of the surrounding leaf mold without touching off a general conflagration. He saw the proof of that right in front of him, but the very idea was still ridiculous. He'd never heard of any fire intense enough to totally consume a human body . . . not to mention one that burned a neat hole out of drifts of dry leaves without spreading at all!
He furrowed his brow, trying to identify the elusive, disturbing sensation. It was more like the energy patterns near portals than anything else he could think of, but it wasn't the same as that, either. It was . . . different.
He growled in frustration and stood, looking around until he spotted Acting Platoon-Captain Arthag and Parcanthi. They were standing together to one side, and he strode briskly over to them. When he tried to explain his confusing impressions, the cavalry officer looked baffled, but the Whiffer blinked. He frowned for a few seconds, then nodded vigorously.
"I think you're onto something, Soral," he said. "I kept getting a Whiff of something really odd in this clearing. It was pretty strong where our people died, but it was even stronger over there." He pointed into the standing trees opposite the clearing where the crew had made its fatal last stand. "I got the strongest sense of it where I caught the flashes of those weird, shiny tubes Kinlafia described."
"That's interesting." Arthag rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looking from one spot to the other. "You sensed it at the point of impact, and at the point of origin. But not between? Shouldn't there be a parabola of residue between them, along the trajectory?"
"You'd think so, Sir," Parcanthi agreed with a frown. "Let me Whiff this again."
He moved slowly and carefully across the open ground between the two spots, again and again. He quartered the area meticulously, but when he came back, he shook his head.
"There's not a damned thing between them, Platoon-Captain. Nothing."
He looked perplexed, and Arthag's frown deepened.
"That's impossible!" the officer protested. Then grimaced. "Isn't it? I mean, how can something shoot without following a trajectory?"
"I don't have the least damned idea, Sir, but that's what it looks like they did. There was some kind of powerful energy discharge at the enemy's gun emplacement." He pointed. "There was another one where the weapon's discharge struck." He pointed again. "But I'm telling you, Sir, that there's nothing between those two spots. Not even the ghost of a signature. And this energy feels so damned weird it would be impossible to mistake its signature if it was there in the first place."
The three men exchanged grim glances.
"Just what in hell are we dealing with?" Hilovar asked for all of them in an uneasy tone, and Arthag scowled.
"I intend to find that out." He glanced at Parcanthi. "Can I send the men in to search the site yet, or do you need to take more readings first?"
"Keep them away from our people's death sites, if you don't mind, Sir. I do want to take more readings there, see if I can pin down more information about who died and who might not have. And stay clear of that area for now." He pointed to a spot under the standing trees. "That's where they tended their wounded before evacuating. I want to take a close scan of that, as well. You can turn them loose anywhere else, though."
Arthag nodded and strode across the clearing to Chief-Armsman chan Hathas.
"Spread them out, Chief-Armsman. I want every inch of this ground searched, from there—" he pointed "—to there." He indicated the two off-limit sites Parcanthi needed to scan again.
"Yes, Sir. Any special instructions on what we ought to be looking for?" chan Hathas asked.
"Anything the Tracer can handle, Chief. We're looking for anything he can get a better reading off of. As it stands, we don't have enough surviving debris to give Hilovar a decent set of readings. Find something better for him."
"Yes, Sir." Chan Hathas looked out across the clearing, his jaw clenched, and nodded sharply. "If it's out there, we'll find it, Sir," he promised grimly.
"Good," Arthag said, and then turned to face the sole survivor of Chalgyn's slaughtered crew.
"Darcel." His gruff voice gentled as he called the man's name.
"Sir?" The civilian's question was hoarse, his expression stricken and distracted.
"Pair up with Nolis, please," Arthag said quietly. "Compare what you saw through Shaylar's eyes with what he's picking up. I know that's going to be hard on you, but we've got to know precisely how many of our people were killed."
"Yes, Sir." The words should have been crisp, but they came out as a shadow of sound, barely audible, and distress burned in Darcel's eyes. He turned without another word and headed out across the broken, fire-scorched ground, stumbling over the rough footing.
It wasn't just the debris that was responsible for his unsteady gait. Just being in this clearing was agony, but he also had trouble distinguishing between what his own eyes saw and what he'd Seen through Shaylar's eyes. The memories kept superimposing themselves over what he was seeing here and now. He kept trying to step over branches that weren't there, and stumbled over ones that didn't exist in the view Shaylar had transmitted. He blinked furiously, trying to clear his distorted vision, and cursed himself when he couldn't. He needed to be clearheaded, not muddled between past and present. He had to be if he was going to help spot something that would provide clues for Parcanthi and Hilovar.
He stopped, turning in place, looking for the exact spot where Shaylar had crouched, where the agonizing memories in his mind had been born of fire and thunder. There. It was somewhere in that direction, he decided, and started forward once more, moving with grim determination through the confusion of reality and remembrance. If he could find the spot, he and the others might dredge up something they could use. Darcel had little hope that anyone had survived, but he needed to know. One way or the other, he had to know, because anything would be better than this dreadful uncertainty. This doubt.
He cursed the men who'd done this, not only for the killing, but for burning the dead and stealing everything they'd been carrying. They hadn't even marked the ash piles in any way! What kind of barbarians didn't even mark a grave? If they'd simply marked the sites, just indicated which piles of ashes had held Sharonians, and which their own accursed dead, there wouldn't have been this horrible doubt. The column would have known how many people needed to be rescued.
And how many needed to be avenged.
Darcel couldn't even lay remembrance wreaths at the graves of his dearest friends because he didn't know whose ashes were whose! It was intolerable, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it, other than help the Whiffer and Tracer wring every scrap of information they could from this place and from his own memory, with its perfect recall.
Shaylar's entire transmission was still in his memory. He simply had to calm down enough to retrieve it, and he had to remain detached enough to analyze every fleeting second of those harrowing minutes. If Shaylar had known where everyone was, and if she'd been aware of everyone's deaths as they occurred, then theoretically, he knew that, too. Those were distressingly large "ifs," but he had to start somewhere.
So did Platoon-Captain Arthag. The officer had to know if they were on a rescue mission, or a punitive strike. So Darcel tramped through the fallen trees, comparing views and angles with what he saw in memory.
It took a long time, but he found it in the end. When he finally located the spot, he stood peering down at it for a long silent moment. Had she died here? Or "merely" been wounded badly enough to knock her unconscious?
Most of the branches and tree trunks in a four-foot swath around her place of concealment had been scorched during the battle. Dead leaves had burst into flame and burnt to white ash, some of which had fallen onto branches below, and some of which—protected from the wind—still clung to branches and twigs, paper-thin ghosts, holding their shape eerily . . . until the slightest touch of his breath caused them to crumble to nothing.
He was tempted to crouch down to match the views precisely, but he stayed carefully to one side. He didn't want to contaminate the site with his own energy residues, but even so, his boot brushed a thick clump of char that wasn't wood.
What the devil? Darcel frowned and bent over it. Someone from the other side had clearly looked at it after the fight and dumped it again, leaving it as useless. That was the only way it could have gotten to where it was, because it wasn't where Shaylar had been crouching, and the ground directly under it wasn't scorched. Most of the ground wasn't, actually, he realized with another frown. It looked like the fireballs had passed horizontally through the broken trees several inches above the ground.
But there was one burnt spot down there, he realized. One directly under where Shaylar's feet had been.
This is where she burned the maps, he realized.
An icy centipede prickled down his spine as he recognized it. He'd found the remains of her map satchel, and the binder which had held her meticulous records. Both of them had been made of oiled leather, to resist rain, and the binder had been wrapped in a waterproof rubber case, as well. None of them had burned completely, despite her frantic efforts. She'd ripped out individual pages from the binder to burn her notes, just as she'd burned the maps one by one, to ensure their destruction. Then she'd tried to burn the satchel and binder, as well.
He didn't even poke at the charred lump with a stick. He left it for the Tracer to examine, instead. Since both Shaylar and one of her killers had handled it, they might get something valuable from it, so Darcel marked its exact location and kept looking.
A moment later, his throat constricted as he discovered why she'd lost consciousness so abruptly. A thick branch behind the spot where she'd burned her maps and notes was marked by dried blood and several strands of long, dark hair. Darcel's fingers went unsteady as he reached towards the strands, but then he made himself stop. Parcanthi and Hilovar needed to examine everything here before he contaminated it.
Darcel looked for the branch where Jathmar had been flung when the fireball caught him and spotted a few shreds of scorched cloth on the ground directly beneath it. The branch itself, thick as Darcel's forearm, had been seared black . . . except for a spot exactly the width of Jathmar's body.
The Voice moved cautiously around, staying outside the actual spot while his eyes searched carefully. The unburnt bark of the limb into which Jathmar had been thrown was scraped and cut where gear and buttons had dug into it, and he peered at the ground to see if anything of Jathmar's had fallen into the leaf litter.
If anything had, their attackers had found it first and carried it off. Unwilling to risk stirring things up with a closer search, Darcel called the Whiffer and Tracer over to join him and explained what he'd found.
"You'd better go first, Nolis," Hilovar said, glancing at Parcanthi. "You need uncontaminated patterns. I'll touch the evidence once you've gleaned what you can."
Parcanthi nodded and started with Jathmar's spot first. He closed his eyes and went very still, and even though Darcel couldn't sense the energy patterns Parcanthi was carefully examining, he knew enough theory to recognize what he was doing.
Every living creature generated its own energy field, created by that mysterious, poorly understood force that animated a physical body. Inanimate objects had their own strange energies, as well, and all objects vibrated at a specific rhythm. A person sensitive to those rhythms could detect them, focus on them, separate them from one another and wrest information from them. Could discern what forces had worked upon them, could draw visions—the famous "flashes" of the Whiffer—of past events out of the energy flowing about them.
Someone like Soral Hilovar, on the other hand, could touch an object and trace the major events in its history. If a living creature handled or came into contact with an object, some of that creature's life energy remained behind. The residue was like a static charge, except that it never entirely dissipated. Details would fade eventually, yet for the most part, the energy patterns left behind endured for a long time. But where a Whiffer might use those patterns to determine what had happened, a Tracer, like Hilovar, was sensitive to the connection between the object and whoever had touched it. Unlike a Whiffer, a Tracer couldn't see the general vicinity of those events, couldn't pick up flashes of what else had happened in its vicinity. But in many ways, what a Tracer did see was considerably more detailed. He could frequently tell whether or not the person involved in an event was dead or still alive. And, somewhat like Darcel's own sensitivity to portals, a Tracer could determine a directional bearing to the person in question.
The residue Whiffers and Tracers worked with was even stronger when a complex living creature—like a person—took a specific action. A violent action, or one steeped in powerful emotion—terror, rage, passion—left the strongest residue of all. If someone picked up a rock and bashed somebody else with it, a ghostly imprint remained behind, creating a shadow copy of the action . . . and its results. The shadow copy didn't even need to be tied to a specific object, if the original action had been sufficiently intense. The stronger the emotions, the stronger the copy. Sometimes, the shadow could last for years, particularly indoors—
Parcanthi hissed aloud and flinched. Sweat beaded up on his brow and a cliff, trickled down his temples.
"Oh, sweet Marnilay," he whispered, his voice shaking. "They burned him alive . . ."
Darcel's mouth tightened into a thin, harsh line. He knew exactly what the Whiffer was Seeing. He'd already Seen it himself.
"He collapsed there," Parcanthi said in a low voice, eyes still closed, pointing to the ground. "He was still alive when they found him. Their emotions were strong. Excitement. Relief?"
The last words sounded puzzled, but a flare of hope shot through Darcel, sharp and painful. Alive. Jathmar had been alive!
But Parcanthi was still talking, and Darcel's heart clenched at the Whiffer's next words.
"He was burned something ghastly. His back was burnt black, the shirt was just gone—burned away. He was barely breathing. Someone's crouched over him, trying to help. Gods! I can See bone down inside the burns!"
Parcanthi shuddered, his face twisting.
"It's too faint, curse it," he whispered, "and there were too many people crowded into the spot. The energy patterns are all jumbled up, imprinted on top of one another. I can't sort them out."
His intense frustration was obvious, and he opened his eyes and shook himself.
"That's it," he said grimly. "I'm not going to get anything much clearer than that from here." His jaw muscles bunched for a moment, and his nostrils flared as he inhaled. "Let me try Shaylar. Where?"
"There."
Darcel pointed, and the red-haired Whiffer nodded. His lean, craggy face was pale, covered with cold sweat, but he walked across and crouched down, as Shaylar had, surrounding and centering himself in the residue. Bleak eyes closed again, and he gave another shudder . . .
"She's burning everything. Maps, notes. She's shaking, linked to Darcel. Jathmar's starting to climb down from there—" he pointed to a spot above them, without opening his eyes. Then his entire body flinched.
"Fire! There's fire everywhere!"
He was slapping at his own clothes, clawing at his hair, shaking. Then the fireball Darcel had seen through Shaylar's eyes passed, and the Whiffer sagged in relief. He turned, eyes still closed, toward the branch that had knocked Shaylar unconscious.
"She crashed into that." He pointed to the blood-crusted branch. "She's lying still. Her face is swelling up, turning purple and black. There are cuts and scrapes."
Darcel's breath faltered. This time, his hope was so terrible it actually hurt his lungs, his entire body. If her face was swelling and bruising, she was alive. Corpses didn't bruise—did they? He realized that he wasn't sure, and the uncertainty was intolerable.
"They found her, too," Parcanthi said. "They're shocked, horrified, that they attacked a woman."
Darcel's fists clenched at his sides. He didn't want to think of these bastards as people who could be shocked and horrified by what they'd done to an innocent, lovely girl.
"They can't wake her up," Parcanthi said abruptly. "There's something wrong, desperately wrong. Inside her head. They're trying. They're frantic, but they can't wake her up, and she's badly injured . . ."
His voice shook, frayed. Then he groaned.
"It's fading out! The whole godsdamned thing's wavering and fading away. They carried her out of here, but I can't See anything beyond that. It just fades into nothing. Or, rather, it blurs into that same mess Jathmar's did, with all the imprints jumbled up together. I can't see anything more than that."
"You have to!" Darcel cried, unable to stop himself. "We have to know what happened to her! Is she still alive?"
"I can't tell!" Parcanthi's eyes opened, filled with anguish. "Too many people died right here." He waved at the toppled trees around them. "And too damned many people came through here—trying to rescue survivors, trying to find every last piece of equipment. It all bleeds and blurs and fades like ink in the water." He furrowed his brow, rubbed his eyes. "Maybe if we can figure out where they took her and Jathmar, I can tell more from there."
Darcel choked down more frantic demands. Parcanthi couldn't do the impossible, and he knew it. So he turned to Hilovar instead, and the Tracer glanced at Parcanthi.
"Go on." The Whiffer nodded. "I've got everything I'm going to get out of this spot. I'll head over to the trees, where the enemy's lines were, try to find the spot where they tended the wounded. Maybe I can tell more there."
Parcanthi extricated himself from the spot where Shaylar and Jathmar had fallen. As he did so, Hilovar met Darcel's gaze squarely.
"You have to realize," the ebony-skinned Ricathian said in a low, cautionary tone, "that I may not be able to tell, either. I can tell you what happened to an object and the person or people most closely associated with it, but I may not be able to Trace anything beyond the event itself."
"But Tracers can find missing persons from hundreds of miles away!" Darcel protested. "I know they can. You've done it yourself!"
"Sometimes I can," Hilovar agreed. "That was useful in police work when I was still working homicide. But you have to understand, Darcel. The more traces there are at a crime scene, the harder it is to filter out just one. I worked a case once where an entire extended family had been killed by portal pirates. These bastards had a nasty habit of raiding isolated mining camps, taking off with years' worth of profits, and killing all the witnesses.
"There were so many members of the gang, so many victims, and so much violence done in such a small space, that I couldn't get an accurate Trace on anything. It took us over a year—and three more slaughtered mining camps—to run the bastards down. If there'd been only one or two victims, or fewer pirates, I could probably have nailed them in a matter of weeks. Maybe even days."
Hilovar's eyes were dark with remembered pain and frustration, and he sighed.
"We've got the same trouble here. There was so much violence the event residues have contaminated the objects caught in the middle of them. Everything I've touched so far has so many echoes clinging to it that I can't get accurate readings. If we had more objects to Trace from, the odds would be better. But with so little evidence, and so many strong residues, it's going to be tough. I'll do my dead level best, I promise you that. And if we can find the place where they took the wounded, if we can isolate something there that she and Jathmar touched, the odds will go up. But even then, it's going to be dicey. And if there's another portal nearby—"
He spread his hands, indicating helplessness.
"I don't understand," Darcel said, with a frown.
"Portals always screw up a Trace." Hilovar seemed surprised by Darcel's response. "You're a Voice—and a Portal Hound, too. Can you transmit a message through a portal?"
"Of course not. No one can trans—"
Darcel stopped abruptly, and Hilovar nodded with a compassionate expression.
"The energy around a portal is always weird stuff, damned weird. That's another reason it took us so long to trace those damned pirates. You can't Trace anyone through a portal any more than a Voice can send a message through one, or a Mapper can Map through one of them . . . and you can't just follow someone through and pick him up again on the other side. Stepping through a portal . . . scrambles the residue. Those pirates would slip through a portal, and every trace of them would literally vanish. It was like the gods had stepped down, erased their very existence. This—" he waved at the virgin forest surrounding them "—isn't anyone's home universe, which means the other side came through a portal, too. If they've taken any survivors back through it with them, the odds of Tracing them on the other side— Well, I'd be lying if I told you they even existed, Darcel."
Darcel cursed, then gritted his teeth and nodded. At least Hilovar was too honest to offer false comfort, he told himself.
"All right," he said. "I understand. Do what you can."
The Tracer took a deep breath, turned away, and grasped the branch Jathmar had struck. His knuckles locked, and a ghastly sound broke from his throat. His eyes shot wide, and his pupils dilated in shock, then shrank to pinpoints. He shuddered, then jerked his hands loose and shook them violently, as though flinging off drops of acid.
"Sorry," he muttered, scrubbing sweat from his face with one forearm. "I'll . . . try again."
He gripped the branch longer, this time, but his entire body began to shake. The muscles of his face quivered, veins stood out in his temples, and his voice, when he finally spoke, was thick with pain and shock.
"Hurlbane's balls . . . ! Bones broken . . . bleeding inside, deep inside . . . burns from scalp to knees . . ."
Blood vessels popped up in terrifying relief along the backs of Hilovar's dark hands, hands like gray marble, carved from stone.
"He can't . . . he can't possibly have lived. Not with those injuries. Not more than a few minutes . . ."
Flashes of memory—that accursed, perfect memory of a Voice—showed Darcel Jathmar's easy laughter. His boundless enthusiasm, his sheer joy in the adventure that was life itself. There were hundreds of those memories, thousands, and Darcel Kinlafia closed his eyes as he felt his heart turn to cold steel.
Then he opened them again. Hilovar had let go of the branch. He stood flapping his hands, as though they, too, had been burned.
"And Shaylar?" Darcel asked after a moment. "What about Shaylar?"
The Tracer drew a shallow breath, as though it hurt to expand his chest more deeply. Then he cleared his throat.
"Is there something specific here I can Trace?" he asked, and Darcel pointed to the charred map satchel. And to the bloody branch with the dark hair caught in its bark. Hilovar looked at them both, then nodded.
"Only one way to find out," he muttered, and Darcel literally held his breath as Hilovar's strong fingers closed gently around the strands of hair and the blood-crusted branch. Dark eyes closed once more as Hilovar gave himself to the Traces.
"She was alive when they took her away," he said after a moment in a strong voice, and Darcel's hope leapt. But then Hilovar frowned. "Alive, but unconscious." He bit his lower lip, and his voice faded to a terrible whisper. "Blood pooling under the skull. Putting pressure on something critical. Swelling . . ."
His hands began to shake, and he shook his head hard, then released the branch and opened his eyes.
"I can't see anything beyond that, Darcel. She was alive, but . . ."
The pain was even worse because of that brief, thunderous stab of hope. But hemorrhaging in the brain sounded at least as serious as Jathmar's more overt injuries, and might well have been worse. Darcel looked away, blinking burning eyes, as the anguish stabbed through him.
"Could—" He stopped, cleared his throat. "Could she have survived something like that?"
"I don't know." The Tracer's voice was hollow, full of bleak uncertainty and exhaustion. "I'm no surgeon, Darcel. I can't even tell what part of her brain was injured, only that it felt . . . critical. If the injury wasn't in a life-threatening area, if they had a skilled surgeon close enough . . ."
Hilovar didn't have to finish. There were probably no more than a dozen surgeons in all of Sharona's far-flung universes who would have been capable of repairing the sort of damage Hilovar was sensing. What were the odds that a pack of crossbow-armed barbarians would have a surgeon with those skills with them out here in the middle of these godsforsaken woods?
Hope died, messily, and what grew in its place was colder than the frozen Arpathian hells. It cut through him, cruel as any razor, and it hungered.
Darcel Kinlafia looked into Soral Hilovar's eyes and caressed the butt of his revolver almost gently.